Stephen Hawking is born in Oxford in January 1942, his parents having left London for the birth because the city was under German air attack; Hawking later said a V-2 rocket struck just a few streets from the house. The film follows his upbringing in St Albans, where he attends St Albans School and credits his mathematics teacher, Dikran Tahta, as the person who set him toward science, even though family pressure pushes him to apply to University College, Oxford, for natural sciences rather than pure math. His physics tutor there, Robert Berman, recalls a student who barely took notes or opened textbooks yet outclassed his contemporaries, a gift that turns Hawking's borderline final exam into an oral defense the examiners concede he wins easily. The account ends with his move to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he shifts from observational astronomy, which never interested him, into theoretical cosmology. This is origin story only: schooling, teachers, and the choices that pointed him toward the physics for which he later became known.